Episode 309: Best Episode Ever?

[This episode is unedited, so be prepared for some naughty language.]

This week has some stunning news items, causing an overstuffed, long episode, so big even Jordan’s wife chimes in, and Jonah and Paul argue hotly over the last item. The Gaming Flashback for this episode is Super Star Wars.

This week’s huge news:

  • EA gets exclusive license to publish Star Wars games, powered by Frostbite 3 engine
  • Uplay causing problems with Steam version of Heroes VI expansion Shades of Darkness
  • The Sims 4 officially announced by Electronic Arts
  • Michael Biehn hints at Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon sequel
  • Doritos Crash Course 2 coming May 9, still free
  • Spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness hitting crowdfunding on May 6
  • Gearbox dismisses Aliens: Colonial Marines lawsuit as “beyond meritless”

Also some listener feedback, plus this week’s Question: “What was your Golden Era of videogaming?”

0 thoughts on “Episode 309: Best Episode Ever?”

  1. Had to re-write the message … lesson learned: don’t rush into rebooting your computer.
    I also noticed that I skipped an episode 🙁 …

    @EA gets exclusive license to publish Star Wars games, powered by Frostbite 3 engine
    Yay, quick profits, here we go! Sure, it’s easier to license an IP rather then keep a studio. There is however the issue of quality: would people like “Call of X-Wings”?
    Jonah, the name of the studio was Westwood. They did all C&C games up to and including Renegade. Not sure how many of the devs remained with EA though, after the studio was aquired.

    @The Sims 4 officially announced by Electronic Arts
    The time of CD key for EA has passed :P. This time they’ll be putting DRM first, but drop the MMO-like requirements. I expect an on-line DRM, but with much less bandwidth requirements. Think of Assasin’s Creed as opposed to Diablo III.

    Don’t you dare edit the “fucking seasons”!

    @Michael Biehn hints at Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon sequel
    Could be a lot of wishful thinking, if you ask me.

    @Spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness hitting crowdfunding on May 6
    Is there a success story that involves an old IP that the publishers forgot about and crowd funding? So far everything I heard of are just projects in development, so I’m asking: was something similar to this released?

    @Gearbox dismisses Aliens: Colonial Marines lawsuit as “beyond meritless”
    The lawsuit is meritless. Unless there’s a written document, signed by all parts involved, that the game will not contain human opponents, it won’t stick.
    Yes, what they did is bad. Yes, we don’t learn the lesson. We never do. Yes, we’ll most likely still pre-order games.

    @QOTW:
    Hard to name a particular generation. I liked the ’90s in Romania, with their NES clones and pirated cartridges. The whole experience was new, and there were so many games to play!
    I also liked the 2001-2005 period. It’s then when I turned to the PC.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Sony’s E3 Conference: Fairly ImpressiveSony’s E3 Conference: Fairly Impressive

We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.

The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.

I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.

They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.

Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).

By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.

Well done Sony.

Episode 631: Nintendo Dislikes VirtualEpisode 631: Nintendo Dislikes Virtual

This is the second attempt at Episode 631, as the previous episode had bad audio, and was boring to boot. This week’s episode features a lot of questionable content, as well as a Dark Souls Gaming Flashback.

The news includes:

  • Surprise Halo Infinite multiplayer launch buckles Steam servers
  • Grand Theft Auto Trilogy back on PC after Rockstar removes ‘unintentionally included’ files
  • Microsoft adds 76 more games to Xbox backwards compatibility
  • Nintendo explains why there is no virtual console on Switch

Let us know what you think.

Gaming Podcast 182: Condensed VersionGaming Podcast 182: Condensed Version

This is a Gaming Podcast lite episode, it’s got less calories because we’re right in the middle of travel plans heading to New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail (conference). This is also the reason the show is going out late this week as I’m posting it from a hotel room with crappy wifi, but we did it… we got it done. I’m keeping the show notes simple this week because we’re rushed for time.